It's time to reinstate the Superfund tax

Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerExterior of the pipe shop and electrical house on the site of the old Roebling factory works. The structure is a Superfund site.

Superfund sites — and New Jersey has more of them than any other state — won’t go away by ignoring them. Although that seemed to be the strategy of the Bush administration, we know that toxins, even when swept under political rugs, infect our playgrounds and backyards and seep into our water.

New Jersey has received $3 billion from the Superfund over the past 30 years and $150 million more in stimulus money, but only 29 of the state’s 142 hazardous-waste sites have been remediated. There still is a lot of work to be done, and more sites are being discovered and added to the list every year.

But there’s a problem: The Superfund is broke. The tax on oil and chemical companies that provided cleanup funding lapsed in 1995 at the insistence of the Republican Congress under Speaker Newt Gingrich. By 2002, the Superfund ran out of money. Since then, taxpayers have been paying for cleanups when the responsible party could not be identified, or had gone bankrupt.

The issue is simple: Should citizens pay to clean up the toxic messes — created by businesses in the pursuit of profits? The answer is no, and two New Jersey legislators, Rep. Frank Pallone and Sen. Frank Lautenberg, both Democrats, have proposed legislation that would reinstate the tax.

Federal funding is even more critical for New Jersey, because the state carries the additional burden of cleaning 18,000 to 20,000 sites that don’t qualify for federal money.
You’d think all New Jersey legislators, with toxic sites threatening the lives of their constituents, would be pushing hard for the tax. But you’d be wrong: Pallone was not able to get a single Republican co-sponsor.

This is anti-tax ideology run amok. It is reasonable too ask the oil and chemical industries to bear this cost, given that they are the source of most of the pollution. They can’t be allowed to escape that responsibility by finding a way to dissolve their assets after the fact.

Those who oppose the Superfund tax because they’re against any tax put corporate well-being over the well-being of this generation and others. It’s silly, really. Opponents insist they don’t want to saddle their children and grandkids with debt, but exposing them to carcinogens for generations to come is okay.